I explained that Felicity was our client. “Surely you wondered how we had come to find you?” I did not find it strange that she had not asked, with so many other things to think about.
But she surprised me. “No. I felt certain it was Mama’s doing.”
“Your stepmother?”
She shook her head, smiling uncertainly. “I mean my own dear, departed mother. Departed from this plane, but not utterly gone. I know that now, because while I was … dead … I found her again.” She sighed. “I know you find it strange that I don’t feel angry and vengeful towards Mr. Smurl for what he did to me, but I can’t. This is not, as you may think, that I am afraid of him, or that I am under compulsion, but, truly, because I am grateful. Yes, really grateful for what he did, for the great gift he gave me. Perhaps I would feel differently if I had been kept there much longer, pressured to become another wife, but in that time the good still seemed to me to outweigh the bad. Every time he ‘put me under’ he enabled me to escape to another place—and my mother was there. I would have happily stayed there with her forever, but she told me I must go back, I was too young and still had a life to live. She said I must escape.” She frowned and looked uncertain. “I know that I tried. I have a feeling I did manage to get away from the house, once, but then Mr. Smurl found me and brought me back …” She shrugged off the incomplete memory. “I don’t know exactly what happened, but she said not to worry, she would send someone to save me.” She smiled at us. “And then you came.”
“Your Mama sent me,” said Felicity. “She came to me in a dream. It was a true dream—I knew it all along.” She smiled triumphantly, then added, “It was after I saw you in the cemetery that I had the dream.”
Felicity explained that Alcinda had somehow managed to get away, and described what she had seen. But when she repeated Smurl’s words to her, Alcinda exclaimed that it could not be true; she would not believe he would ever say such a thing, especially not to a child!
“Are you certain, my dear, that that was not a dream?”
Felicity glowered. “Of course it was not! I know very well when I am awake. But Papa would not believe me, either, even though he did not know it was Mr. Smurl I had met, and I did not know what to do, how to find you again and save you from that horrible beast.”
She carried on speaking over her sister’s objection. “I wished Mr. Sherlock Holmes was not just in stories, because if he was real, I could write him a letter. I thought he would surely recognize that I was telling the truth! That night I dreamt that he was real and that I had decided to visit him, so I took the train all by myself, up to London, and set off to find Baker Street. I was standing on a street corner, looking at a map that I couldn’t quite read, when a kind lady offered her help. She looked just like the picture on the wall above Alcinda’s bed, so I knew at once who she was. I almost said, Aren’t you dead?’ but then I thought that would be rude, so I thanked her and said I was looking for the great detective, at 221-B Baker Street. She told me that the address I wanted was actually 203-A Gower Street, and then she walked with me, all the way—it was the most extraordinarily detailed dream!—and she showed me the door. It was your door,” she said, nodding at us, “but in the dream it was different. You really only have a number on the door. In the dream, there was a brass plate on it with the names Jesperson and Lane. When I woke up, I remembered those names, as well as the address, and I knew that this was where I had to come—although it was a very long way from Sydenham. And expensive.”
“I did wonder how you came to find us,” I said.
“Did you know my mother, when she was alive?” asked Alcinda, obviously puzzling over the question. “Before she was Mrs. Eugene Travers, she was Maria Lessingham.”
Jesperson, who would have been a mere child at the time of Mrs. Travers’s death, said mildly, “I never had the pleasure.”
The name Lessingham provoked no more recognition in me than Travers had, but, before I said as much, I thought of the past few years in which I had spent so many hours in darkened rooms, in the company of men and women who claimed the ability to commune with the dead and act as conductors for their spirits. Many, if not most, were frauds, but I could not dismiss them all, even if I had sometimes speculated whether thought-reading, or telepathy, might not provide a more accurate explanation of their powers than the claims made by spiritualists. Maria was a common enough name; while I could be certain I had never met Alcinda’s mother in the flesh, I could not so easily dismiss the possibility that her spirit had encountered mine at some séance …
For a moment, recalling the excitement of my early explorations in psychical research, I wondered how I could have let myself be distracted from the great question of what becomes of us after death by smaller concerns, and I realized, too, that Alcinda Travers and I were not as different as I had thought. Perhaps, a few years ago, I would also have found Mr. Smurl’s strange proposal too tempting to refuse?
Mrs. Jesperson returned bearing a tea tray. For her son, she had prepared a small silver pot of very strong coffee (to revive his sleep-deprived brain), and for the rest of us there was a light and fragrant Chinese tea served in beautiful little blue-and-white china bowls.
Gulping down her tea without ceremony, Felicity was eager to go back home at once. Alcinda explained her concerns, and that Mr. Jesperson had offered his help. “Perhaps, if it is not too great an imposition for me to stay here overnight …”
Felicity interrupted her sister: “Why can’t Mr. Jesperson do it now?”
“Certainly I can, if it suits you,” said he, and drained the last of his coffee.
Alcinda was soon settled in the most comfortable chair, with Jesperson perched beside her on a stool.
“Would you like us to leave?” I asked.
“No, no. So long as Miss Alcinda is happy.”
“I am,” she said. “I do not wish to be parted from Felicity so soon!”
“You would like to go home with her?”
“Oh, yes!”
It occurred to me that the inhibition about returning was already gone, but Jesperson continued:
“I would like for you to envision the place, a very specific place, that means home to you.”
“My own bedroom,” she said promptly. “It is the smallest and the highest in the house, but I chose it for my own.”
“Think of it in as much detail as you can.”
“Oh, that’s easy. My little worktable and chair are beneath the dormer window. My bed is against the wall behind it. There are shiny brass knobs on the bedstead, and a patchwork quilt on the bed that I made with my two best friends. Over the bed is my favorite portrait of my mother. I look at it every day and night. I used to talk to it.”
“Focus on it. See it in as much detail as you can—you don’t have to speak aloud; just observe it for yourself.”
She closed her eyes.
“As you look at it, think of how happy you are to be back home again, how comfortable it makes you feel, to be in that room, looking at your mother’s face. You can see the love she felt for you in your mother’s face. She is the person who loved you the most, and has always kept you safe. There is nowhere else you would rather be; nowhere else you feel so warm, and protected, and loved, and safe. You are in your room, safe and happy, warm and well.”
He went on like that for some minutes more, in a voice so compelling and soporific that at one point I dozed off and dreamt I was in that room myself, a room I had never seen but felt was my own true home, looking at a picture of my own mother with a relaxed feeling of comfortable well-being that was very far from the reality of our relationship.